It was Oct. 27. Just two weeks earlier, a small group of Lane College students took front seats on city buses and successfully desegregated Jackson City Lines Inc. in just a few days.

Now loomed a much bigger challenge.

Unbeknownst to most of their classmates, five members of Lane's Student Movement Association left campus that morning and entered Woolworth's about 11 a.m.

Jackson Sun file photo - This photograph, taken in the early 1980s, shows the Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Jackson. Civil rights demonstrators challenged the counter's
"whites only" policy beginning in October 1960. Managers picked a white woman named Exie Barber to serve the counter's first black customers in the mid-1960s, when the ban was lifted. Exie Barber died in 1998, but John Barber remembers his mother telling the story.
"They knew she didn't mind. I think she was always proud of that."

They promptly sat down at the "whites only" lunch counter. Store employees immediately closed the counter.

Lunch counter "sit-ins" had already gained widespread national attention when black students and others did the same thing in Greensboro, N.C., Nashville and other communities across the South earlier in the year.

Buoyed by the victories in other cities, the Lane students quietly sat for three hours that day, reading books. Some read the Bible.

For those few hours, the sit-ins were relatively quiet, unknown even to many people on the Lane campus.

"The entire college didn't know totally what was going on," recalled Albert Porter, the adviser for the student group and trainer of the demonstrators. "It was a small group."

This photograph was taken in the late-1970s. The tall building at left is the First National Bank building. Woolworth's opened in 1917 and closed in 1987 when it moved to the Old Hickory Mall. Woolworth's, the bank building, and others facing Main Street were torn down in 1993 and replaced with Jackson City Hall.

Then, about 100 spectators gathered at Woolworth's.

"Get out of here, coons!" shouted a group of angry white youths as they dragged the students from the store.

Some hurled rotten eggs and sprayed bug spray, all the while verbally assaulting the students.

At McLellan's that afternoon, reaction came more quickly.

Five Lane students sat down at the McLellan's counter, a block north of the Woolworth's, and refused to leave.

"We don't serve y'all," a waitress snapped.

Manager Fred Cook summoned police, who arrested the students and charged them with disorderly conduct and "threatened breach of peace." Bond was set at $50 each.

McLellan's closed the counter and used it to display Christmas cards. The store temporarily removed the stools.

The students left and licked their wounds.

News of sit-in spreads

Lane student Ruby L. Brown of Memphis would later tell a mass meeting of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference about the sit-ins:

"At Woolworth's and McLellan's, we went in to sit-down only to have a mob form. We sat there while they kicked us for 2 1/2 hours. It was then they decided to throw us out.

"We decided to go back and be arrested or served. This time they poured hot coffee down our backs, put out cigarettes on our backs. They threw the boys out one at a time. They took the two girls and threw them bodily from one group to the other before throwing them out. The policemen were watching and did not act."

Word of the first-day confrontation at Woolworth's and the arrests at McLellan's spread to the Lane campus. Learning of their classmates' bravery, the Lane student body, about 500 strong, lined up to make history.

"It was only after they were arrested and it hit the news ... that's when it became a unified effort on campus," Porter said. "Then students wanted to volunteer to go. They either wanted to go demonstrate or go to the sit-ins."

After the first sit-in, Lane students visited the downtown lunch counters daily, while other students marched on the sidewalks outside carrying signs of protest, said Shirlene Mercer, a freshman named Shirlene Ross at the time.

Trained in non-violence

Lane leaders trained Mercer and others how to respond nonviolently when they were confronted and attacked at the lunch counters.

Former Sun reporter John Parish, who is white, covered the Jackson sit-ins and marveled at the self-restraint displayed by the demonstrators.

"It was only after they were arrested and it hit the news... That's when it became a unified effort on campus."Albert Porter, advisor for the Lane student group

"Those students from Lane who were doing the sit-ins, they were the most disciplined young people I've ever seen in my life," said Parish, now retired and living in Franklin in Middle Tennessee. "They would sit there and ignore the taunts."

The students had been trained to expect violence and to react peacefully. Each had agreed to a set of nonviolent principles based on the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Parish also acknowledged that the scene sometimes became ugly.

"I can remember two or three occasions where it got out of hand, where hecklers came in there and would pick up tulip bulbs from a nearby counter and toss them at them.

"I remember one time when somebody broke an egg over one guy's head and he just let it stream down his face and didn't say a thing or resist or anything."

A group of white men from Joe's Pool Room just around the corner from Woolworth's would always confront the students when they sat at the counters or demonstrated, Mercer said.

She would be attacked within minutes every time she sat down at a lunch counter in either store. Angry whites spat at her and hit her with eggs, tulip bulbs and milk shakes. Many yelled racial epithets.

Billy Schrivner, a white man who worked in downtown Jackson in 1960, said most people simply ignored the sit-ins.

"The students would walk around like people do who are on strike," he said. "I think there was a lot of restraint and a lot of cool heads prevailed. The city leaders knew it was serious, and they were trying to keep it from gaining any more steam in Jackson."

Warren Roberts, a policeman at the time and later sheriff of Madison County, also said cool heads prevailed.

"There would be four or five blacks go in and sit at the lunch counter. Before you knew it, that many or more whites had thrown them out, and then they are gone. I remember some scuffling going on, but I don't remember anybody getting hurt.

"The idea was to get it behind us peacefully," Roberts said. "I thought it was handled very, very well. Nobody that I know of ever got hurt. They may have got their feelings hurt a little bit."

White community responds

Nevertheless, some local whites taunted the demonstrators daily, and some prominent whites - including the county district attorney and other officials - joined the Federation for Constitutional Government, which placed ads in The Jackson Sun that defended segregation and identified black businessmen who helped make bail for the demonstrators. The group also held meetings to petition for segregation and to hear speakers talk about fighting for the "Southern way of life... to the bitter end."

Managers at Woolworth's and McLellan's tried to deflect the attention by placing long boards on the counters and announcing the counters were closed for business as soon as the students sat down.

Almost always, it was the students who were arrested. That left a bitter taste in Mercer's mouth about police, who at the time did nothing to the white people except when things got out of hand, she said. Some people passed by and threw bottles and the police did not act, she said.

Students were usually charged with disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace. Fines ranged from $5 to $50. Black attorney Emmett Ballard usually represented the students in city court.

Many students signed a "pauper's oath," which meant they weren't able to pay the fines. It was a strategy used throughout the South. Even though demonstrators were able to pay the fines, they refused in hopes of filling up local jails and drawing more attention to their cause.

Most fines were never paid.

"We were jailed over and over and over again," Mercer said.

The students didn't, however, skip class. It wasn't allowed. They served the movement on their own time. Unless, of course, they were arrested.

"I remember having a literature class with 20 people in it, but on a particular day there were three because the others were in jail," recalled Allan Ward, a former Lane humanities professor and head of the speech department during the 1960s.

Allan Ward
former Lane humanities professor and head of the speech department during the 1960's.

Itching for change

After that first sit-in, radio and word-of-mouth immediately spread the news throughout the black community, which appeared to be itching for change. The Jackson Sun, then an afternoon paper, ran a short story on Page 11.

"I have to say that 90 to 99 percent of the black community was with us," Porter said. "And if the others were not with us, they were not against us either."

Mass meetings began immediately and would be held most Sundays throughout the movement at local black churches, long the focal point of black communities since the days of slavery and a haven for grooming future black leaders such as Martin Luther King.

Lane was founded in 1882 by the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, which was founded in Jackson in 1870 and would later become the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

"The black church became the place where the meetings could transpire. It became the place where the leadership cadre could come," said the Rev. Arthur David, now pastor at St. Paul CME Church at Lane. "It was available. Many of the other institutions wouldn't allow it. The church became the center. It was all-important."

Hundreds of residents turned out for the meetings, eventually moved to the fairgrounds to accommodate the large turnouts.

Because of potential reprisals from the white community - real or imagined - most Lane students who were from the Jackson area stayed behind the scenes.

"I was one of the few from Jackson that participated," Mercer said.

Some whites in Jackson reached out in peace to the black students, mostly working in secrecy. Dr. Walton Harrison, Bess and David Crane, and others met quietly with black leaders and formed a civic league that worked for equality.

Back on Lane's campus, the 25-year-old Professor Ward, a white man, had arrived with his doctoral degree from Ohio University.

"As I was getting my degree and being offered jobs in other parts of the country, I couldn't turn away from the South where all of these things were starting to happen, thinking that maybe I could go and use the communications background to help people talk with each other.

"I wanted to go to a college in the South where I could have the freedom to function and work directly with civil rights and human rights activities, and the place that I went to was Lane College."

Ward, now 65 and living in Little Rock, Ark., near longtime friend Porter, was anxious to help the Lane bookkeeper and fellow faculty member in this noble cause.

"I lived on campus during the time I was there and at the time when we met, he (Porter) was already leading the activities related to the students," Ward said. "And I told him I was there to help in any way I could, simply let me know. I started doing whatever I could, with the meetings, the discussions, attempting to get groups together, and so our evenings, our weekends, were all spent virtually continuously for years, on the movement."

Curious, but cautious

As the movement gained steam, a group of white Methodist women asked Porter to speak to them and explain why the students were demonstrating.

Porter asked Ward to go with him to act as a "buffer" between the two groups. Also in the group was Lane faculty member Essie Perry.

Porter wasn't sure what the Methodist women hoped to accomplish.

"I think they really wanted information and we were very grateful that a group would come forth in conversation over this and see what the facts were. They were genuinely interested."

From that meeting eventually came a Jackson human relations council that "was a group, black and white, coming together to discuss, to understand each other better."

That would come later, however.

Such interaction had to be done in secret in 1960, and white men weren't yet willing to come to the table with the black community.

"It was just women," Ward said. "They explained to us when we got there that their husbands, who worked for one of the other two colleges there - their jobs would be in jeopardy if they were there.

"By not being there, they could say they didn't necessarily know what their wives were doing."

Even 40 years later, neither Porter nor Ward was willing to name the women or the meeting location. They wouldn't even name the college with which the Methodist women were affiliated, only saying that it was one of the two colleges in Jackson. Lambuth College, now Lambuth University, is a United Methodist Church school.

" 'Were you followed?' the women asked the Lane group as they arrived. They looked up and down the streets to be sure no one was watching because such an interracial meeting in town "was not acceptable."

"Why are you doing this to the city? Why this?" the women asked.

"So that we could have all the same rights and opportunities," the Lane contingent replied.

Ward recalled a moment when one of the ladies got a call from her babysitter that her child was ill.

"And for a moment, the discussion as it had been going stopped, and people started talking about children and families," Ward said. "Like a magic moment, people started talking as people and not as groups."

The Methodist women would eventually agree to help the movement, Porter said, but again without anyone in the white community knowing.

They would serve as valuable witnesses when the students' nonviolent resistance encountered angry white aggression and a criminal justice system clearly stacked against them.

Their usefulness was obvious.

"In talking, we said 'When we go to court, who's going to believe us?' " Porter said. "At that time, ain't no one believing black kids. We needed somebody as lookouts. That's where Allan (the Lane professor) and the Methodist women assisted in that."

Strategy develops

Ward, the white professor, would go into Woolworth's and other segregated facilities, "and they wouldn't necessarily know me in that context of who I was and where I lived in town."

He'd place an order and be there 15 or 20 minutes before the students arrived.

"And I was to do nothing as far as giving any recognition that I knew them and was not to interfere in any way, but was to become a potential witness as to what took place."

Both sides knew racial tensions would sometimes come to a boil during the daily demonstrations.

And on Oct. 28, 1960, a day after the first sit-ins, police arrested three youths - two black and one white - when a fight broke out at the McLellan's lunch counter.

One black youth was arrested for allegedly carrying an open knife.

Earlier that day, sit-ins had begun at the Woolworth's about 1 p.m. Again, a group of white youths forced the Lane students from the store.

Lane students picketed outside Woolworth's and McLellan's and young white men ripped the signs from their hands. The students returned later with new signs and resumed, eventually leading to the fight.

The next day, 11 blacks and two whites were arrested following sit-ins at Woolworth's and McLellan's.

A white man who was not identified was found carrying a crude blackjack.

White hecklers threw tulip bulbs and a few eggs at demonstrators, striking some. Police responded as fighting appeared imminent.

Both stores closed the lunch counters for the rest of day.

Demonstrations continued off and on without serious incident for the next several days.

Then on election day Nov. 8, 144 people, mostly Lane students, were arrested for marching downtown in support of voting rights for blacks in Haywood and Fayette counties, where blacks had been threatened and injured in efforts to register to vote.

The sit-ins took a five-week breather afterward. They resumed in earnest in mid-December accompanied by a boycott to put the squeeze on downtown businesses at Christmas time.

As in many Southern towns, when sit-ins and picketing didn't work, boycotts proved to be among the most effective tools to bring about change.

'We need you'

Lane College President Wesley McClure was a Lane freshman when he got the call that winter of 1960.

Student leader Henry Nichols asked him to go downtown to the picket lines. Cars were there on campus to carry the students to the front lines.

Christmas neared.

"I was told to dress warmly," McClure recalled.

Raised by a grandmother who frequently took him as a youngster to downtown stores, courthouse offices and other establishments where the employees were all white, McClure "saw this city through her eyes, what she experienced."

This strong lady who was limited to doing domestic work for white families would tell young Wesley that those employees "weren't doing anything that I couldn't do."

Those trips were frequent, so by the time he got downtown that chilly day in 1960, he was on fire inside. He wasn't scared- or hesitant.

"My feeling was 'we're going to change things,' " he said. "I was excited about it. I was more excited than worried."

While most of the older generations of blacks, inextricably tied to a way of life that depended on white whims and wishes, couldn't bring themselves to man the front lines, they were there pounding the concrete sidewalks in spirit.

"The older people appreciated what we were doing and they told us so," McClure said. "We knew something was going to happen and everything was going according to script."

But because Christmas break was nearing, many out-of-town students, the front line mainstays, weren't around.

So local Lane students stepped up their involvement in the boycott of downtown retailers and manned the picket lines.

The struggle ahead

McClure was among several Merry High School alumni that had decided to attend Lane.

He had already gotten a hint of the coming struggle two years earlier in 1958, when he joined a group of young teens in a church basement.

"I was told by a group of ministers in a basement of St. Paul (CME Church) one afternoon that they had picked a group of kids who could withstand the type of atmosphere that would ensue," he said.

He recalls on that afternoon of seeing a variety of folks - young, middle-aged and old - in that basement. But he particularly recalls seeing "highly-respected gentlemen" within the church and the community who made it clear "that something needed to be done here and that we were the ones to get it started."

"Needless to say, I felt some spiritual basis for this," he said.

McClure and other demonstrators were often taken to the CME Publishing House off Shannon Street, a kind of headquarters for the movement built years earlier by prominent black businessman I.H. Anderson.

At the publishing house, movement leaders read students 10 points of behavior to be adhered to at all times.

Sandwich signs were available there, with slogans such as "Don't Shop Here."

Students grabbed them and then walked or got a lift the 2 1/2 blocks to Woolworth's. They were told which adult "monitors" would be on hand in case of trouble.

Monitors were always sent to the demonstration sites to make sure students weren't seriously harmed and that police weren't letting things get out of control.

"There was a comfort there," McClure recalled. "We knew they would intervene if something happened."

The idea, however, was to avoid any trouble.

"For us, it was going up and down the sidewalk, saying nothing," he said.

The stoic, well-dressed picketers would work one- to two-hour shifts, then a wave of other students would relieve them.

Their instructions were specific.

McClure didn't recall all of the points, but those he did flowed from his tongue like a Pledge of Allegiance:

Officially, Jackson's power structure was a three-member city commission.

Quinton Edmonds was mayor and in charge of public safety, police and fire. Buddy Patey was vice-mayor and commissioner of health, education and welfare and recreation. Tobe Bailey Sr. was commissioner of streets and utilities.

Those three white men also made up the Jackson school board.

Patey was 34, almost 30 years younger than either of his cohorts. He is the only one still alive.

"We were concerned about bigots and outside people coming in to make trouble," Patey said. "We wanted to make sure nobody over-reacted like Bull Connor did in Birmingham."

Birmingham, Ala., Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor was among the most brutal police chiefs in the South. His order to turn fire hoses and vicious dogs on Birmingham demonstrators, some of whom were kids, was captured on national television in 1963 and outraged federal officials as well as Northern whites who had largely ignored the movement up to that point.

Keeping up the pressure

Jackson police shunned such brute force.

"Generally, the police were just supposed to keep order during the sit-ins," Patey said. The question of whether to serve blacks at the lunch counters "was looked upon as a private business decision."

McClure and his classmates kept the pressure on.

"We knew that the power structure was paying attention," McClure said. "It was ripe for moving to a conclusion.

"We were a ready pool," he added. "The idea was to always have a presence" downtown.

Woolworth's eventually closed the counter down for an extended period.

"That was exciting," McClure said. McLellan's kept its counter closed, and Woolworth's finally integrated its counter in the mid-1960s, after several more years of demonstrations.

McClure was never injured during his involvement in the demonstrations. But he recalled a brush with violence that occurred one day after he finished a picketing shift.

Instead of going down to the CME Publishing House as was the protocol, he decided to strike out walking back to Lane. He was almost to the railroad tracks.

Nearby was an S&H Green Stamp store located east of where the Jackson Utility Division building now stands.

McClure, rubbing his eyes firmly as if to dig deeper in his mind for a clearer vision of the memory, found himself that day staring at trouble.

"As I was going through that area, there was a white man holding a shotgun."

"Stop, Nigger!" the man said.

McClure didn't hang around for conversation.

"I ran like mad," he said. "I ran nonstop all the way back to Lane. ... Lane was a safe place."

Lane was also a safe place to view the rest of the world. Students and their professors talked constantly about the civil rights struggle taking place across the nation. Their attention was soon riveted on a spot just down the road, in Haywood and Fayette counties, where black people were denied the right to vote, and sharecroppers were being removed from their land.

Lane students decided to slow their protests and switch gears to join the voting rights bandwagon.